Aaron Delp’s BladeVault.info

I’ve been following all the press regarding IBM’s new Multi-Node 3950 M2. The machine looks great and the ability to scale from one 4 socket box to multiple boxes (2 at this time) is simply awesome. You simply can’t match that kind of raw horse power.

But then I got to thinking… At what point is it too much? Let’s just talk about ESX for a second, I know the box has other applications but I want to focus on ESX. A single 3950 M2 offers a maximum of 16 cores (4 socket x 4 cores) plus up to 128GB of memory (256 GB when the 8GB DIMMS are released). Double that in a two node configuration and you get 32 cores and 512 GB.

ESX 3.5 currently supports 32 cores (64 core is experimental) and 256GB max. I could see an extreme situation where 32 cores with 256 GB (using the cheaper 4GB DIMMs) might be feasible if your workload is CPU bound. Yes, I know if you compare the underlying chipsets the IBM X4 chipset screams compared to anything else. It will blow the doors off most blades (no matter who makes them) for pumping raw data through the pipes. The problem at the end of the day is money. It is getting increasingly more difficult to justify the high end servers on a price vs performance comparison. The 3950 M2 performs better, but at what cost? Also, with VMWare HA and DRS features, the scale “out” (using more, smaller boxes) has become more appealing than the scale “up” (using less, larger boxes) for distributing workloads across machines while maintaining overhead for a machine failure.

Increasingly in Information Technology, it is becoming a “Wal-mart” world. Often times, good enough will do. What do you think?

(Thanks to Scott Lowe and Matt Portnoy for keeping me honest on the max values for ESX!)

This article over at the Server Virtualization Blog got me thinking… Are Blades the next “Pizza Box” servers for ESX? By that I mean are Blades reaching the mainstream to the point that they are becoming a commodity? In my role as a pre-sales Engineer, I speak to many customers and you can predict what many of them want to talk about before we walk in the door, Blades and ESX.

Yes, we still move pizza boxes and many customers (usually the price sensitive ones) still love them. Now that the blade market has matured, we are seeing less and less of the pizza box attitude.

Let’s take that a step further, what are they buying? Some decide to go with the smaller form factor blades (IBM HS21 and HP BL460c) but a surprising number are going for the larger HP BL680c. The BL680c Blade is a four socket Intel Blade with a maximum of 128 GB of memory and plenty of expansion ports, especially using the quad port Ethernet expansion (remember to use the right model quad port card for ESX!!) For me, the small blade vs large blade decision always ends in the “it depends” answer.

You’ll notice I didn’t throw out an IBM 4 socket model. Not to throw IBM to far under the bus on this one but LS41 product just isn’t appealing to most customers right now. That is a discussion for another day.

What are you seeing? What are your thoughts?

vinternals has a great article on the current subtle differences between ESX 3i and full blown ESX. By “subtle”, I mean they will bite you in the butt as an Engineer if you believe the marketing people. This is the main reason I started the site. I want to get information out there to the technical masses that often leads to trouble if you haven’t run into it before (or somebody does and tells you!).

The Infiniband isn’t that big of a deal to me but the HA and Networking caveats are! I hope it helps!

Just a heads up for everyone, the new 31.4 GB Solid State “Disk” (43W7618) for the IBM Blade Servers is supported on the entire product line. The previous generations (16GB single and dual platter) were only supported in the HS21 XM.

Also, this model is a single platter, not a dual platter (think RAID 1 within the disk case) and as far as I know a dual platter isn’t in the works for now.

This is an update to my previous articles here and here on this issue.

I now have confirmation from HP that the supported OS’s for iSCSI Boot on the Blades are RHEL (versions 4 & 5) and SUSE (versions 9 & 10). There is no Microsoft or VMWare support at this time.

IBM also has a Power Calculator, available here.  The IBM tool is a little rough around the edges, but it gets the job done.

The IBM tool is a download vs. an on-line tool.  The configuration of a chassis is very easy to do and the report is very straight forward.  I would like to see a user populated utilization level to customize the report but you can make the calculations yourself with the information provided.  Lastly, IBM allows you to add the PDU’s you need, a nice touch.
IBM only supports exporting the data to an Xls format.  All in all, a bit of an ugly baby but it provides the necessary information.

In case you haven’t seen it, HP has a great power sizer for the BladeSystem that is available here. You will need an HP Passport ID to get into the site. The tool is very easy to use and configure. I like the ability to customize the utilization level to choose a value other than 100%. When the calculations are complete an idle amount is given as well as a utilization level.

There are three different types of reports the tool will produce: A printable version (that you can print to PDF), a Doc version, and an Xls version. Of the three different versions, the doc version is the most complete and looks the best for customer consumption.

One pet peeve though… HP, please remove the shopping list at the end with list prices!! Let’s face facts, list prices are useless to most people and this should be a technical report, not a sales pitch! Other than that, it is a very easy to use tool, check it out!

This is an update to this article on the IBM HS21 BIOS 1.07B.

IBM has confirmed to me that this is a problem that should be addressed in another BIOS patch. The only OS that seems to be affected is Red Hat. According to IBM support, it turns out that the BIOS looks at the stepping levels of the chips and if the second CPU level is different than the fist CPU level, it will “mask” them to the OS so this problem will be avoided.

For some reason, there is a bug in the code as of 1.07B that this doesn’t happen. It has been confirmed and should be corrected shortly.

UPDATE: This article has been updated here.

This is a follow up to my previous article about HP Blades not booting iSCSI. I have learned that the HP Blades do boot (and are supported!) some Linux OS’s. Microsoft is still not supported and I don’t have the official word on VMWare yet. I should have an official list next week. As soon as I get it, I will post it here.

This is actually old news and is one of those you won’t believe it until you try it kind of tips. It occurred to me to post this tip when I was creating the bootable floppies to flash the HBA and TOE cards.

Believe it or not, IBM Blade Centers (and most IBM servers these days) will not boot to an NEC USB Floppy. In order to boot to a floppy, it has to be a TEAC floppy disk drive. For whatever reason, the NEC drive doesn’t pick up as a boot device and the system will by-pass it.

If you are using IBM Blades in a Boot from SAN configuration and you want to flash to the latest BIOS and firmwares, how do you do it before you install the OS?

The answer is good old DOS. The 4GB HBA and iSCSI cards are both made by Q-logic and if you look hard enough, you will see that they provide DOS utilities to flash both of these cards to the latest version, if you have a DOS boot disk. Remember the DOS Boot Disk? Do you still have some in your desk or in a storage cabinet somewhere?

If you’re like me, it took a little bit to come up with a floppy drive and some blank media to work with. I didn’t want to go through this again so I created the disks, made IMG files of them, and stored them on the site for safe keeping. I created a custom page over here if you are interested in downloading them. I also included the commands to invoke the flash for both disks.

Hello all – Just a quick note that I haven’t been posting because I spent the last week getting the site up to speed on Wordpress.  The site is now configured with plug-ins, feeds are on feedburner, etc.  If you are reading this on the feed and you haven’t been by the site, take a look and let me know what you think!

Also, I just got back from the doctor and I have Bronchitis.  Not fun!!  I’ll be laying in bed the next few days so no new posts for a bit longer.  Thanks!